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Updated: May 2, 2025
Everything is relentlessly investigated, the enormous structure of natural law is being discovered to underlie all the most surprising, delicate, and apparently fortuitous processes, and no one can venture to forecast where the systematisation will end. The result is a great inrush of bracing and invigorating candour. It is not that our liberty of reflection and action is increased.
To the many, the systematisation and establishment is and ought to be undertaken as a means to the more efficient furtherance of some practical end. Further, the only justification for the seeking of knowledge for its own sake is that thereby it may be better understood, better established and better systematised, and so become better fitted to make practice more efficient.
It does not believe in the possibility of "happiness" on earth as conceived by the literature of the economists of the Seventeenth Century; it therefore spurns all the teleological conceptions of final causes through which, at a given period of history, a final systematisation of the human race would take place.
The first attempt at a systematisation of the results of the modern sciences was that of Auguste Comte in his Philosophie Positive. This philosophy, however, under its name of Positivism, exerted a far greater influence, both in Comte's time and subsequently, in England than it did in France.
Mill as with Turgot this deep distrust of sect was no hindrance to the most careful systematisation of opinion and conduct.
Now the speculative intellect trained in dialectic had no material to work upon save what could be got from the Scriptures, the Fathers, and the dogmas of the Church; and Scholasticism is the name given to the attempt to apply the processes of logic to the systematisation and the interpretation of the Catholic faith.
Loss may be the result; but aggrandisement is what is sought, though the effort fails through lack of organisation or system. And again 'self' is not the only possible centre for the systematisation of conduct. System in conduct may be realised in other ways than as self-assertion.
The object of establishing a system of knowledge is not to pass examinations, this is the schoolmaster's error, but to render future action more efficient, to further in after-life some complex interest of a practical or theoretical nature. To the few, indeed, the establishment and systematisation of knowledge may be an end in itself.
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